Lifting the pernicious veil of secrecy

THE standard keyboard that was invented in 1872 is known worldwide as the QWERTY after the first six letters in the top line of letter keys. The American naturalist Stephen Jay Gould relates in his collected essays Bully for Brontosaurus (W.W. Norton, 1991) that the characters on the QWERTY keyboard were deliberately set to be inconvenient, thus ensuring slower typing speeds. The reason was simple. Typists using the earliest mechanical typewriters could reach such high speeds that the keys were frequently jamming. Unfortunately, the effect could not be seen by the typists until they removed the page whereupon the entire sheet had to be retyped.

Subsequently, as Gould puts it, by some strange "technological continuity law" in common with historical and biological evolution, the QWERTY keyboard survived into the age of electronic keyboards, despite the fact that the jamming problem was no longer relevant. All recent attempts to create a ...

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